Hell Mountain

Some secrets are buried too deep for the snow to hide. When Grace Ryan vanishes into the backcountry of Bright Mountain during an avalanche, the search for her unravels dark secrets. A rookie ski patroller hides a devastating connection to her past. A traumatized patrol director fights to maintain absolute control. And Grace herself faces a terrifying subterranean reality that demands a reckoning with guilt, grief, and the dead. As the mountain closes in—through ice, darkness, and vertical stone—faith, guilt, and obsession collide. On her first day at the Bright Mountain ski resort, college sophomore Grace Ryan slips under an orange boundary rope into forbidden backcountry—and is caught in an avalanche. As the search intensifies and the hours stack up, three distinct paths converge: Grace's harrowing survival underground, where the boundaries between the living and the dead dissolve. Luke Harmon, a rookie ski patroller concealing a secret that destroyed his life. Shane Tyler, the patrol director whose obsessive rule of the mountain masks a trauma that never healed. Part survival thriller and part supernatural descent, Hell Mountain is a literary thriller set against an unforgiving alpine landscape, where survival depends as much on belief as on physical strength. Drawing on the eerie local legend of the Lord of the Mountain—a shapeshifting figure who carries pretty girls into the deep—this novel explores the limits of rescue and the weight of what we owe the dead. By turns terrifying, tender, and darkly funny, Hell Mountain delivers a narrative of psychological intensity, spiritual dread, and elemental force.